With the abundance of data made available through various means in general and, in particular, through the Internet and world-wide web (WWW), there is a need for efficient management of multimedia content. Searching and organizing multimedia content generally, and videos in particular, are challenging at best due to difficulties in representing the content and comparing the information indicated by the content. Further, searching and organizing multimedia content becomes even more challenging as the amount of content available increases.
Some existing solutions for organizing and searching for multimedia content utilize metadata to represent the content that can be compared to textual inputs (e.g., queries) to determine whether multimedia content is relevant. However, such metadata may be incomplete or inaccurate, thereby resulting in ineffective organization and searching. Specifically, the metadata may not represent all aspects of the content, particularly abstract or otherwise more complex aspects. For example, metadata of an image showing a car may indicate the presence of the car, but may not indicate the make or model such that any searches for a particular make and model of car do not result in identification of the image. As another example, metadata for an image showing two people may indicate each of the persons but not indicate interactions between the people shown in the image or the underlying meaning of such interactions.
Additionally, the massive amount of content available, for example over the Internet, makes searching for multimedia content a resource-intensive process. As a result, searches are often limited due to resource constraints, or may otherwise take more time to complete.
The rapid increase in multimedia databases in recent years therefore calls for the application of new methods of representing information featured in videos and other multimedia content. In particular, it would be desirable to organize content that is relevant to a particular user. Further, once multimedia content is organized using these new methods of representing information, sharing the content with relevant users would be desirable.
It would be therefore advantageous to provide a solution that overcomes the deficiencies of the prior art.